


Howling Like Real People Do

by bigskydreamin



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Scott McCall, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, I leave it to the eye of the beholder, can be considered Scott/Boyd or just gen friendship, the bite is a gift
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-16 23:24:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4643991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigskydreamin/pseuds/bigskydreamin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU one shot in which Vernon Boyd pays more attention than anyone gives him credit for, Scott McCall is closer to breaking than anyone else bothers noticing, and even when everything is different, a pack still manages to start and find its way together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Howling Like Real People Do

Vernon Boyd was young when he learned the importance of being wallpaper.

Talking. Shouting. Laughing all the time, the way his classmates constantly did - it was exhausting. Distracting. Too busy doing things to ever actually notice things. Never really watching the things that needed watching.

So Boyd learned to be wallpaper. Let others do the doing; he resigned himself to just watching. If you were always paying attention, if you never took your eyes off something, they couldn’t disappear.

He couldn’t say how old he was when Scott McCall became one of the things he watched. One day he wasn’t, and then one day he was. Maybe it was when Scott’s asthma kicked in when they were in fourth grade, or when Scott’s dad left when they were in sixth. Maybe it was in eighth grade when Scott and Stiles drifted apart. Dates weren’t really important though. What mattered was Boyd always made sure to keep one eye on the other boy where he sat alone at his own table across the far end of the cafeteria.

Scott, he was pretty sure, had never gotten the hang of being wallpaper. Definitely didn’t want to be wallpaper, if the wheezing, desperate, painful to watch attempts to better his lacrosse skills in the back parking lot after school were any indication. Sometimes Boyd wished he could do something about that but well, Boyd needed to watch.

But then sophomore year happened. He kept his eyes on Scott same as always, juggled him between everyone else who needed paying attention to - Isaac Lahey, Erica Reyes, Tracey Stewart. He had it down to a science by now. Routine ingrained into his muscle memory, his gaze following a steady, regular trajectory through the halls of Beacon Hills High as though programmed by some state of the art government tracking software. There was never more than a split second between shifting his focus from Isaac flinching away from Mr. Harris to Scott, when Jackson shoving him against a locker triggered his periphery vision.

And yet somehow, despite his best efforts, sophomore year Scott started to disappear anyway.

His smile disappeared first. Even mired as he was at the absolute lowest levels of high school’s social circles of hell, Scott had always had this bizarre ability to find flickers of humor in the most unlikely places. He could be wandering aimlessly from the science labs to the quad when a smile would just erupt out of nowhere. Like some vast, unfathomable shift of internal tectonics had just set off Vesuvius, and the whole world couldn’t help but be blinded in its wake.

But his smiles had all gone dormant now. Whatever recesses of passion he’d once regularly ignited had all cooled to rock hard obsidian. He kept his head bowed, hair hanging loose and wild over his forehead, dripping down to obscure his eyes.

Boyd watched even more closely, narrowed his vision to a singular focus. Neglected the others even, too afraid to look away for so much as a fraction of a second now.

And yet Scott continued to disappear.

His appetite went next. Lunch lingered untouched next to him at his table in the cafeteria, and for a brief window Boyd wondered if an eating disorder was to blame. But strangely, Scott wasn’t getting thinner. If anything, he was growing, filling out his shirts more, adding muscle mass despite never going near the gym as far as Boyd ever saw. And he wasn’t the only one to notice. Lydia, Allison, even Danny could all be seen appraising Scott when he passed them in the hall, yet this seemed to make him disappear even faster. He shrank in on himself, hunched over, shying away from the attention Boyd once had been sure he craved.

Then went the interest in schoolwork. Where once Scott had dedicated himself to highlighting every passage their English Lit teacher lingered on, now he stared listlessly out the window. Gone was his eternal patience. The jabs the lacrosse jocks had been sending his way the past several years no longer rolled harmlessly off his back. Instead he snapped and snarled, lunging at Greenberg once with such suddenness the other boy practically shit himself. Never sticking around to celebrate his victories, practically fleeing down the halls as though only belatedly realizing what he’d just done.

Finally, Scott started to disappear in the flesh.

He missed two days of school the first week back from winter break. Started showing up later and later every morning, always so exhausted he looked drunk as he stumbled through the halls. He slept through class now, vanished into detention without complaint. Boyd watched every second, but right before his eyes he grew less substantial, less real. Day by day by day.

Sometimes Boyd worried when Scott finally vanished for good, it would be like a strong wind came out of nowhere and just wiped him off the face of the earth. Other times he felt the other boy would just fade away, like a memory or a ghost. Like wallpaper the sun had seared clean of any color until all that was left was a few stubborn streaks to hint that anything had once been there at all.

Boyd couldn’t say for sure when he decided being wallpaper wasn’t enough anymore. But it was a Wednesday when he sat down across from Scott in the cafeteria at lunch hour.

“Mind if I sit here?”

Scott looked up with an odd mix of confusion and resignation on his face. As though he’d somehow anticipated Boyd’s arrival, even absorbed as he was in tracing spirals into the lunch table with his fingernail, yet still at a loss to explain it.

“Nah, its cool.”

Boyd pulled out his pre-bagged lunch, carefully made by his mother every morning before she headed off to the law firm she was a paralegal at. She trusted school lunches about as much as she did rat poison, and was fond of reminding him she couldn’t sue if he ended up in the hospital before she finished getting her law degree. It made for a good opening.

“Wonder what would happen if we asked the school administrators to actually eat that stuff themselves.”

“Huh?” Scott looked up again, following Boyd’s nod towards the bubbly mess of lasagna sitting neglected off to Scott’s side. “Oh, yeah. Yeah its pretty nasty.”

“Mom always makes me an extra sandwich. Its roast beef. You want it?”

The other boy eyed the proffered sandwich warily, looking back up and tilting his head to the side as though listening to something. “She just made you a whole extra sandwich?”

Boyd shrugged. “Yeah, its like ever since I hit my growth spurt, she’s convinced herself I’ll pass out from hunger if I eat less than a full army battalion. I try telling her, but man - you know how moms are.”

Scott’s eyes were still narrowed thoughtfully, but the edge of his mouth twitched. As did his nose, oddly enough.

“For real though, I’m just gonna throw it out if you don’t eat it. And mom makes a mean roast beef.”

Still visibly confused by whatever it was he was reading into the situation, Scott shrugged and accepted the sandwich. Two bites into it and caution went to the wind as he wolfed it down with a speed that left Boyd’s jaw slightly open.

Scott flushed. “Sorry. Fast metabolism.”

Boyd considered that. Gave a shrug himself. Opened his Doritos and started eating. “Okay.”

They sat together again on Thursday, and again on Friday. When Monday rolled around, Scott came to school favoring his side, but by the time Boyd conjured an excuse to gingerly probe the area with a light elbow jab at lunch, he was fine. Boyd had met Melissa McCall when his grandmother was in the hospital a couple years ago. Whatever was going on with Scott, there was no way it was the same as what he suspected might be going on with Isaac. But as the days passed, he noticed more and more that Scott tended to start the mornings acting injured as much as he did exhausted…until suddenly, magically, midway through the day he wasn’t. And that was just weird, right?

Boyd watched from his new vantage point and considered.

Days turned into weeks. A closer perspective yielded details he’d missed from afar. Scott could give a shit about an oblivious Lydia and Jackson and the rest when he gave their little clique a wide berth in the halls - it was Allison Argent he was avoiding, though she seemed as confused to realize that as Boyd was. (She definitely seemed to notice though. Points to her for that. Boyd had no idea how she’d seemed to master both doing and watching as well as she did, but he was a big fan and would totally buy her book if she wrote a How To).

Sometimes Scott would stop and shove his hands into his pockets, teeth gritted and brow beaded with sweat as he worked through whatever seismic upheaval was locked inside his head. When his hands came out, they looked streaked with blood before Scott rushed off to the bathroom to wash them, but by the time he came back there was no hint of the slightest gash on his palms.

He tried following Scott once after he rushed out of school at the ring of the last bell. He drove his dirt bike off into the woods, and on foot Boyd got lost pretty damn quick - nature had never been his friend - but he could hear distant snarls and roars when he found his way back to a path.

And when he watched Scott disappear into the same section of the woods three afternoons in a row, heard roars echoing far off into the preserve and saw his bike still parked at the edge of the trees when Boyd drove by again at ten o’clock at night, he thought, and considered, and laughed at himself for being a ridiculous fool.

But he parked his car next to Scott’s bike anyway, just to see what he might see, sat on his hood and settled in to wait. An anguished howl punctured the darkness somewhere a ways away, and Boyd winced and waited and watched the woods until his friend reappeared.

When Scott did reappear, hovering at the edge of the moonlight like he really believed the shadows were deep enough to hide the dark crimson glow of his eyes, the unnatural slope of his brow or the angled tips of his ears - Boyd held his breath but said nothing. He stood at the edge of a precipice, fully aware that what he said and did next would change the rest of his life. Scott’s too, probably, but there would be no more watching for him after this. Not when there was no point, not when the world was so much better at hiding mysteries he’d never even fathomed than he could ever be at seeing through them. The time for watching was over. If he wanted to really see, he was going to have to learn to do.

So he watched one last time, for old time’s sake, as Scott cautiously staggered towards the vehicles. His shirt hung off him in tatters. Some kind of claws had tracked deep gashes across his torso. He came to a halt a few feet away and Boyd got off the hood of his car, walked around to the trunk and pulled out the emergency first aid kit. Scott followed and waited.

“I’m a werewolf,” he said.

Boyd nodded. “Okay.”

Scott stared at him. Shuddered. And then with a single agonized exhalation, his face melted back into its usual configuration. Claws vanished beneath fingernails. The fiery glow of his eyes dimmed back to brown.

“You still need this, or what?”

Scott’s lips quirked. “Can’t hurt.”

“I’m sorry for dragging you into all this,” Scott said later, after Boyd had dragged the whole sordid tale out of him, along with any possible infection in his side. He cleaned the wounds thoroughly with alcoholic wipes - who knows if anything he was doing was actually helping Scott, but for once he wanted the distraction for himself. It made processing it all easier.

How Scott had gone into the Preserve one afternoon to practice lacrosse, wearing himself out until he fell asleep. How he awoke at night and a monster had attacked and bit him, and how later a man named Derek Hale had given that monster a name - his uncle, Peter. A werewolf like him, and now, like Scott.

How the Argents had come back to town to hunt them, because they were all monsters who deserved to die, apparently. How Derek had convinced him to help him kill his uncle if he wanted to be cured. How it had all been a lie, just to get Scott to fight Peter, weaken him so Derek could take the killing blow, but it had ended up being Scott who ripped out Peter’s throat to save him.

And then, Scott explained - with an resigned air Boyd would have to call disappointment - how Derek had left, unwilling to follow a teenage boy but equally unwilling to kill him and take his power. And how the Argents had let him live, so long as he didn’t take human life. And how ever since, Scott had been fending off the feral omegas and dangerous monsters that seemed to consider Beacon Hills prime tourist real estate all by himself.

“You didn’t drag me into anything,” Boyd countered at last. “I offered you a sandwich.”

“I didn’t have to take it.”

“Yeah you did,” he shrugged. “I wasn’t going to stop until you took it.”

“I can be stubborn,” Scott glowered, a spark of red heating in his eyes and a grim smile alighting on his lips. “Alpha werewolf here. I’m an unstoppable force, remember?”

“I’m an immovable object,” Boyd deadpanned. “Cuz I’m really big, see?”

“I have superhuman strength. I could move you.”

“I have human frailty. You could break me, and then my mom would sue because she’s really looking forward to using her new law degree,” Boyd grinned.

Actual humor almost fought its way to Scott’s face - Boyd was rooting for it - but then the walls came down and he deflated like a spent balloon.

“I just told you I killed someone,” he whispered. “Why are you still here?”

Boyd studied his hands thoughtfully. “Maybe some people just need killing.”

“I don’t believe that,” Scott hissed with a wild, dangerous look in his eye. Desperate - that was a better word for it. He probably didn’t even know what he still believed at this point, to be honest, and who was Boyd to tell him what he should?

“Okay.”

Scott deflated yet again - no wonder he was so exhausted all the time if he were constantly this all over the place, the guy had no sense of equilibrium whatsoever. But he rolled his eyes, so there was that, at least.

“You say that a lot. It’s kinda annoying.”

“You say ‘sorry’ a lot,” Boyd pointed out. “Ask my opinion on that.”

He didn’t.

Instead they settled in companionably on the ground resting their backs up against Boyd’s car. Shoulder to shoulder, breathing in the chill air. It’d been a hell of a night. Boyd was going to have a lot to think about in the coming days as all of this settled in. He wasn’t looking forward to it.

“I told you about my sister Alicia, right?”

“Yeah,” Scott angled his head to view him better. “Why?”

“Do you think…” he trailed off, uncertain how to put his thoughts into words when he wasn’t entirely sure what answer he was hoping for. Would it change anything? Make it better, worse, less his fault? Did he want truth or just absolution? “Do you think there could have been something supernatural about her disappearance?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. I hate this fucking town.”

Boyd grunted in agreement. “You know its not actually your job to protect it, right?”

“Maybe,” the other boy agreed without actually agreeing at all. “But there’s no one else.”

“There could be. You’re an alpha, right? You could make more werewolves.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Scott said. His tone had an almost tangible chill to it. “I’m not Peter.”

“And I’m not you,” Boyd held his gaze, equally defiant. “It’d be different, you know. If there was a choice.”

“I’m not gonna give you the bite, Boyd.”

Boyd just hummed. “We’ll see.”

Scott badgered him into going to a lacrosse game a few weeks later. Boyd gave exactly zero shits about lacrosse, but he was too busy being bemused about Scott showing an interest in a school related activity to protest. Couldn’t tell you who won though. He spent the whole game watching Scott and Chris Argent eye each other dangerously from across the length of the bleachers.

Boyd cornered the hunter in the parking lot after the game. Most everyone else was still busy congratulating someone or other out on the field. Scott had run off to attend to some kind of ‘business in the woods,’ aka confront something bigger and meaner than him with zero prep whatsoever. He had a suspicion Argent was after similar game, but Boyd had prey of his own tonight.

“So you’re cool with letting a sixteen year old who’s never done anything but try and help people die,” he called out across the parking lot. Argent stilled and turned. “As long as you just don’t have to kill him yourself, right?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the older man started, but Boyd cut him off.

“I’m talking about how we both know lone wolves don’t last long in the wild. Don’t pretend you can’t hear him out there every night. How much longer do you think he can last?”

“That’s not my problem.”

“Right, because you only protect real people,” Boyd said, as close to sneering as he could ever remember coming in his life.

“So what’s the alternative? He’s a lone wolf, I can’t help that,” Argent said, spreading his arms. “Unless you want him to give you the bite. Is that it?”

“I want to give him a pack.”

“And that’s all it is? You don’t want the power, the speed. The healing.”

Boyd shrugged. “Scott has all that and he’d give it up in a heartbeat. I’m not stupid enough to think it’ll be any more worth it for me. Maybe I’m just tired of being a lone wolf too.”

Argent was silent for a long time. “You’re loyal to your friend. I can respect that. But I had a friend who was a werewolf once too. And he - “

“He attacked you and you killed him. I know, I heard,” Boyd said. He caught a flash of movement out of the corner of one eye, a flicker of brown hair darting behind a car. He would have missed it if not for a lifetime of watching. “And I also know no one else has ever formed an opinion about a whole group based on one experience and been wrong about that either.”

The hunter’s jaw clenched. “This isn’t a game, kid.”

“Not even a first person shooter one? There’s a lot of Halo addicts in my grade if your side’s looking to recruit. They’re pretty trigger happy, but I figure that’s not really a problem for you.”

Argent shook his head, visibly frustrated as he stared off towards the woods. “You know I can’t actually stop him from giving you the bite, right? But if he’s really the person you think he is, he won’t do it. You ever think, if he does, maybe he is what I think he is after all?”

He couldn’t help but laugh at that. “No offense, Mr. Argent, but I figure whatever Scott does next, you’ll find a way to keep thinking he’s exactly what you already think he is.”

“You’re right though, you can’t stop him from giving me the bite,” Boyd said as he turned to go, heading past the car he’d spotted movement behind earlier. “But you probably should be more careful about where you talk about maybe killing your daughter’s classmates.”

He very carefully kept from glancing over behind the silver four door sedan, but even out of the corner of his eye he could still see Allison’s shocked reaction to his words.

It was like his mom always said, he supposed. He got so used to not talking sometimes he forgot how loud he actually was when he did choose to open his mouth.

Whoops.

And if there was a hint of fang to his smile as she stood behind him and stared across the parking lot at her dad, well.

You are the company you keep, right?

“Let’s use our imaginations,” Boyd said as he slid into his usual seat across from Scott at lunch. Scott surveyed him warily. Boyd was starting to worry his friend considered him predictable.

“What?”

“We’re gonna play a game of make believe,” Boyd replied calmly. “We’re talking hypotheticals. Just making stuff up.”

Scott narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“So just for fun,” he continued with unconcerned ease. “Imagine a world where I asked you for the bite and you gave it to me. What would that look like?”

“That world doesn’t exist, Boyd,” his friend hissed.

“Everything exists somewhere, we learned about it in physics. String theory I think? I don’t know, I was distracted by you dripping blood on the floor from that basilisk earlier.”

“Okay.” Scott shoved his tray to the side and folded his hands in front of him on the table. “Let’s play. For starters, I think it would go something like you trying to guilt trip me into it while acting like you don’t have a duplicitous bone in your body, and I’d finally get so annoyed that I’d bite you just to prove once and for all that its not all its cracked up to be.”

Boyd nodded and sipped at his shitty cafeteria lemonade. “I like the spirit, but that doesn’t sound like you at all. Try again.”

Scott growled and buried his head in his hands, the tiniest hint of claws emerging from the fingertips running through his hair. “It doesn’t matter how it would happen. The important part is how fast it would end up sucking. How quickly you’d regret it. How much you’d be afraid every single day that someone would find out, that they’d call you a monster, that they’d sic hunters on your tail. How much it would hurt each and every time you went up against something worse than you, and how much worse it hurts when ultimately that doesn’t do shit to stop it from hurting other people too. The sheer fucking terror that this full moon might be the one where you lose control and become the monster yourself - “

Boyd leaned over and snatched his arm away before those fingers could become full fledged claws digging into his scalp in the middle of the cafeteria. “I get it! Scott, I get it, okay. Breathe.”

“Then stop it!” Scott glared red-rimmed but entirely human eyes at him from between his still fisted hands. “Stop pushing me, stop -”  
  
“You stop,” Boyd glared back. “Stop spending every night in the woods hunting things bigger and badder than you. Stop crashing into my room before school every morning to borrow a shirt without bloodstains because you can’t have your mom catch you sneaking into your room to change.”

“I can’t,” Scott practically wailed, his face flushed and tear-stained, only it wasn’t a wail, it was more like a howl, the cry of a lost and alone wolf backed into a corner with nowhere to run. And Boyd was the hunter this time, pressing him further and further against the wall, but he couldn’t stop anymore than the wolf could stop backing away. No matter how much he hated it. Hated himself.

“And I can’t either,” he hissed, voice low because people were starting to look now. He should have never started this here, he was just so used to people never noticing him he lost sight of the risks. “Don’t you get it, Scott? Maybe I don’t want to be like you, maybe I already _am_ just like you. Only I can’t do anything but watch because you won’t let me do more.”

“Can’t you see I’m just trying to protect you? I don’t want you to end up like me!”

“And I don’t want you to end up like nothing at all!”

They stared across the table at each other, breaths coming in heavy thunderous gasps.

“I can’t do this,” Scott whispered, sweeping up his backpack over one shoulder. “I have to go.”

Boyd jumped up and grabbed his arm before he could flee. “I know, you have to go run off into the woods and get yourself ripped to shreds by yourself so I don’t get hurt. But before you do, ask yourself. What if I locked you up at night so you couldn’t get out, couldn’t hunt, couldn’t do anything to help anyone some monster might be hurting. It’d be for your own good, Scott. It’d keep you alive, keep you safe. Would you ever forgive me?”

He left Scott gaping after him wide-eyed in shock and ditched the rest of the school day for the first time in his life.

It was almost a week before Scott showed up at his bedroom again. Which was fine. They both needed their space. Neither of them was wrong, Boyd was pretty sure. Neither of them was right either.

Boyd couldn’t see any injuries, but he headed for his emergency stash of bandages and clean clothes anyway before Scott waved him off.

“That’s not why I’m here. I’m fine.”

Boyd eyed his wan, pallid face, lank hair and filthy clothes critically. “You don’t look fine.”

Scott cracked a crooked grin. “Do I ever?”

“No,” he replied without thinking. What? It was true.

Scott settled on the bed next to him, nudging his shoulder. “I’d forgive you, you know. If you did what you said. If you kept me from helping someone.”

Boyd nodded, unsurprised. “Even if it meant someone died?”

His friend swallowed, and settled his mouth in a grim line. “Yes.”

“Bullshit,” Boyd accused.

“I mean it!”

“Of course you do,” he sighed. “Because you’d find some way to make it your fault instead.”

Scott looked away.

“Let me guess,” Boyd said tiredly. “If only you never put me in a situation where I had to make a choice like that, where I had to blame myself for making my friend hate me….how am I doing?”

“Something like that,” Scott shrugged. He fidgeted with the afghan Boyd’s grandmother had knitted him when he was nine.

“You’re ridiculous.”

“I guess,” he said. “What about you? Were you saying you blame me for not letting you do anything, or do you blame yourself too?”

“A little bit. Like its my fault I don’t know the right words to convince you. To get you to see that I want this. I need this.”

“Alicia.”

“Because of her,” he admitted. “But because of you too, and because of me, and because Lahey’s dad beats him and Allison’s dad thinks he’s justified in putting you down like an animal and there are actual monsters in our woods and the world is just so much more fucked up than I ever imagined it could be and I just can’t deal with that just by watching.”

Scott stared at him.

“Did you rehearse that?”

“Once or twice. Did it really show?”

“Nah, barely at all.”

They both laughed. It wasn’t that funny. “If you die…it’ll be because of me. It’ll be my fault.”

“If I die,” Boyd insisted, gentle but firm. “It’ll be on my terms.”

That got him a nod, quiet and resigned. “Where do you want it?”

“Does it matter? The bite’s really not the point, you know.”

Scott smiled. “Yeah, I got that.”

“You’ll stay right? Until its done…until we know, I mean?” Boyd licked suddenly parched lips. “I just…I’d rather not be alone.”

Scott just nodded, but of course he would. Like there’d ever been any doubt. He rubbed his sweaty palms against his jeans. He felt like he should do something, say something. Like there should be something tangible or concrete to look back on later and say this was before, and this was after, this was Boyd the watcher and this was Boyd the werewolf.

But of course there was nothing like that, because things like that only existed in the eyes of someone watching. And there was no one watching. It was just him and a werewolf. The past and the future. Everything and anything.

What the hell. Yolo, right?

********

Boyd dropped into his seat at the lunch table, eyes brimming gold with excitement. Scott looked up. Shook his head. Looked back down at a Sloppy Joe that appeared slightly less inedible than that rabbit Boyd had almost considered appetizing his first full moon.

“You know, for a guy who’s spent years trying to go unnoticed, you’re terrifyingly unsubtle,” Scott pointed out.

Boyd ignored him. “So I’ve been thinking.”

“Here we go.”

“Studies show that its healthy for teenagers to have wide and diverse groups of friends.” He crunched on a chip. Scott dramatically banged his head against the table. “And well, technically studies show that a wolf pack really isn’t a pack if its got fewer than four wolves in it.”

“Oh, is that all.”

“Don’t ask me, ask science. So here’s my thought. Isaac Lahey. Erica Reyes.”

“What makes you think they’d even say yes?”

“They’ll say yes,” Boyd said confidently. “They need it as much as I did. I needed the pack. Erica needs the strength. Isaac needs the courage.”

Scott grunted. “Does that make me the Wizard in this scenario, or Dorothy?”

“I leave that entirely up to you.”

“Thanks. You’re a pal.”

“I am,” Boyd agreed, selecting another chip. “So?”

“I’m not turning anyone else, Boyd. You were a one time deal.”

He hummed. “You say that now.”

“I will say that always.”

“Nah. I’ll wear you down. You know why?”

Scott raised his eyebrows, eyes dancing beneath them.

“Cuz you’re gonna let me.”

“Never gonna happen,” his alpha declared with finality. “This conversation is over. Its done. You are never to speak of this again.”

Boyd shrugged. Stole his Sloppy Joe. Opened his mouth -

“Don’t say it.”

And grinned.

“Okay.”


End file.
